Mindset and Mental Health

What is the link between mindset and mental health? Can a positive mindset help with mental health issues? And can you cure depression or other mental health issues with things like Law of Attraction, for instance?

I can tell you that I absolutely credit what I’ve learned about LOA and the power of my own mind in affecting my external reality with getting me through my own clinical depression. But at the same time, I do urge caution in this area – rushing out and telling your depressed friends that they just need to “think happy thoughts” is not only not going to help those friends, you’re actually going to hurt them if you do that.

Law of Attraction and Mental Health

A 2009 study published in Psychological Science by researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada found that, while people with high self-esteem benefited from the use of positive self-statements (affirmations) people with low self-esteem who used affirmations ended up feeling worse than they did before. On the surface, this might be seen as making positive thinking look bad (and I’ve seen more than a few posts lately that are referencing this particular study as “proof” that positive thinking is a bad thing). But from a Law of Attraction perspective, the outcome of this study actually makes perfect sense.

Law of Attraction tells us that what we send out into the world is what comes back to us (“as within, so without”). From this, we understand that what we are focused on, and in alignment with, is what we manifest into our lives. So the automatic assumption is that focusing on the positive and squashing all forms of negativity is the only way to go. A lot of LOA types push the positive thinking thing for precisely this reason. But the problem is that trying to squash out negativity doesn’t work. When you resist something this way, you’re actually focusing on it. And trying to force positivity when you’re really not there is not only ineffective, it can actually be harmful.

A Positive Mindset is Preventative, Not Curative

And this is particularly important to understand when it comes to the mental health focus that I take here on Vibe Shifting: positive thinking is preventative rather curative. This means that positive thinking is not going to save you when you’re already mired in the hell that is depression – it’s too big of a vibrational jump to go from depression to positive thinking. It’s just not possible. And trying to force yourself into it is going to feel false, and it’s going to make things worse because you’re going to feel like a failure for not being able to think positively. Don’t do that to yourself.

Instead, take a step back and allow yourself to notice where you’re at, and then just accept it: “I feel really bad right now, and that’s OK.” What you CAN do to help yourself is to work with some of the tools that LOA provides you with – your emotional guidance system and the emotional scale. Instead of assuming that you have to just “be happy”, realize that you can’t go from depression to happiness right away. Cut yourself some slack, work with the scale, and find yourself some relief from where you are now. All you need to do is get just one tiny step up that scale from where you are now.

Eventually, you will find happiness again. But it’s a process, not an instantaneous transformation. And as you go through the process of working up the emotional scale, you build up your positivity muscles. It becomes easier to maintain that higher vibration – to prevent a depression “relapse”, and to correct the downshifts when they do happen.

Mindset and Mental Health

I still sometimes feel the old depression hovering around the edges of my awareness, and sometimes, I do get sucked back into it. But the other thing that I have learned through my LOA experiences is that these episodes won’t last. I am able to just let them wash through me without fearing that a major depressive episode is around the corner. I KNOW that I will feel better again soon, and that belief alleviates a lot of the anxiety that goes along with these things, and also seems to make the downshifts shorter than they used to be.

Mindset and mental health do go hand in hand. And negative mindset cannot result in a happy life. Likewise, a positive mindset is critical for creating a happy life. It is absolutely possible to choose to be happy in life. But if you’re starting from a really bad place, then you need to be gentle with yourself and aim for an incremental improvement in your mood, rather than a quantum leap forward from depression to joy.

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8 Comments

A.
on March 4, 2015 at 7:55 am

Yes, this makes sense. I heard a talk by the mystic Daskalos (From the book The Magos of Srovolos) who said that we should not get depressed. There is no need to be and we hurt ourselves more this way, not allowing ourselves to experience what we are here to experience. Also, it is like we do not have faith in the higher power. We are showing this lack of faith with negativity and depression when it happens. He was not downplaying it or anything, just mentioning it as any form of illness which is a misalignment of sorts. And you would want to get better yourself if you were to go to him for a healing. It is the patient’s willingness to be healed. Otherwise, it does not work.

But again, the point is to be gentle with yourself. And I really like what he said because this means that life is supposed to be happy and we are supposed to glide through it. Bumps in the road are just that, bumps to be passed. No need to get so down, but I know it happens so be gentle, as it is the only way to be.

It’s absolutely a misalignment. If you follow Louise Hay’s work, any kind of illness is a misalignment… a “dis-ease” that is contrary to our natural “settings” of joy and ease. I’m not sure that I would phrase it as “showing a lack of faith”, but I definitely think it’s a kink in the natural energy flow, constricting our natural alignment with Source. Always be gentle with yourself… you’re doing the best you can with your knowledge and experience in the moment. That’s all any of us can do.

A.
on March 4, 2015 at 8:12 am

What’s funny is that gurus would be “hard on you” (when they are, which is rarely) for lack of belief, while the populace is always hard on you for one thing or another. For the populace, you can’t get there from here, or may be too this or that or not there yet or taking too long so forget about it, you name it they will say it and judge, But for a guru, Lord bless him/her, it will always be about belief and faith and that is pretty much it. And I love the way they just brush aside what others say, invalidating it and just going on which their connection with source. This is really what it is about.

Interesting article. I agree with you that mindset and mental health go hand in hand.

If you can manage to developed a good positive way of thinking you can improve your mental health – even if it’s a bit.

I also noticed a lot of people saying that positive thinking doesn’t work. You explained very well how people try to “jump” from A to Zen, but when they try it, they don’t “believe” it really works any ways.

Hi Angelo — welcome to Vibe Shifting, and thanks so much for commenting. 🙂 You’re absolutely right — one of things that positive thinking critics fail to take into consideration is that they are trying to make too big of a jump too soon. When people do that, they’re setting themselves up for failure. Working your way up the emotional scale is a gradual process, not a one-time, fix-all jump. A positive mindset is absolutely critical to maintaining good mental health, but getting there takes time and effort if you’re already in a not-so-great mind space.

Erica
on April 30, 2015 at 8:36 pm

I just wanted to say thank you for writing this. I suffer from depression and tried the positive thinking approach and nearly lost my mind. It worked for a bit and then I would go backwards and get even more angry depressed and frustrated because I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working or why it worked for a bit and yet I was still struggling. It wasn’t until I realized that I needed to work through my feelings and deal with the issues that were holding me back before I could move forward. Positive thinking is wonderful but getting to the root of issues and dealing with them is just as important as positive thinking. Burying your feelings will just cause them to resurface and probably even harsher than they were before they were buried. In fact working through the issues will help the positive thinking surface and will be even more effective and blissful. The good thing was that with each set back I developed more and more coping skills through reading the books and learning about the effects of positive thinking but I also learned how to read them with a grain of salt and not to expect instant happiness overnight, it just doesn’t happen. I am still learning but I am also learning to take babysteps and that my feelings are my feelings and it is ok to be sad angry frustrated and so on but that happiness will find it’s way back as I work through or deal with the hard emotions. As I learn more coping skills the stronger I get and the set backs are far less but I also know that it is ok to feel whatever it is that I am feeling even if I don’t like the feelings at the time they are normal and there are ways to get help or people to talk to when I need it. So thank you for writing this article it is really well written and probably one of the best articles I have read on this subject.

Hello Erica — welcome to Vibe Shifting, and thank you so much for commenting (and the lovely compliments). 🙂

I am so glad you enjoyed the article. Mental health is an topic very close to my heart, for obvious reasons. And I believe that the more we bring these things out into the open, sharing our methods of dealing with them, the better off we’ll all be.

So many people get messed up by the “just think positive thoughts” approach to mental illness, and they end up on the exact same merry-go-round that you describe in your comment — it seems to work for a bit, but then things just get worse. It’s because it feels false when you try to do that. You don’t believe it, and it feels like you’re lying to yourself. Which just ends up compounding the problem. You are absolutely right that working through the inner “stuff” that’s holding you back is the best way to approach healing. Burying our “negative” feelings is never a healthy way to try and “get happy”.

I’m so glad that your setbacks have proven to be learning experiences for you, making you stronger every time you heal from them. Over time, any setbacks you encounter will become shorter and less traumatic. You’ll find yourself able to ride them out as if they were waves on the ocean. Eventually, you get to the point where you can kind of relax your way through them and just float on the surface of those feelings until they wash through you, because you know that they will pass. Which makes them much less scary than they used to be.